You can enter in three ways. You can retweet the following message on TWITTER: “Win a free iPod on #Barterquest http://tinyurl.com/2dqolms” You can become a fan of BarterQuest on FACEBOOK and post on our wall what you like about BarterQuest or bartering in general. Or you can register on BarterQuest and invite your friends simply by using this link: https://http://www.barterquest.com/summary/invite_other_networks. By tweeting on TWITTER and posting on FACEBOOK and inviting your friends, you will increase your chances to win. Also, the more often you tweet or post on FACEBOOK, the more chance you will have of winning. You do not have to be a user of BarterQuest to enter. Contest rules can be found on http://www.barterquest.com/home/article/free-apple-ipod.

“This giveaway is intended to thank our current users and encourage others to come to BarterQuest to trade for the things they want,” stated Michael Satz, CEO of BarterQuest. “The BarterQuest community is growing rapidly, by 32% from year end 2009. Page views have increased by 61%. The large and established market for barter is finding its way to the Internet, and in particular to our site, which alone provides a full solution to the problems of finding, negotiating and completing your trades. We hope this promotion will lead more people to use BarterQuest to save money, be green, and have fun.”

BarterQuest (www.barterquest.com), a platform that supports the cashless exchange of goods, services and real estate, today announced that it has formed an Advisory Committee to provide expertise and guidance to senior management. The areas in which the Committee will compliment senior management include B2B e-barter, marketing, and business development. The members of the Committee are the following:

Ray Bastarache is a pioneer in B2B e-barter. He founded Barter Network in 1985, which was a clearinghouse for businesses that traded the goods and services which they produced for the goods and services they needed. The company was one of the largest and most successful trading networks in the United States. After its sale, he remained active in the e-barter industry in various capacities. Mr. Bastarache has served as Treasurer, Vice President, and President of the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA). He received two Distinguished Service Awards from the Association and its first Mentorship Award. In 2009, the barter industry awarded him the “Legends of Barter” Award.

Harjiv Singh is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Gutenberg Communications, a global strategic communications firm. A serial entrepreneur, he has more than 15 years experience in the communications, technology and financial services industries. Mr. Singh frequently speaks and writes on a range of public relations issues, including the impact of globalization. In 2007, he was recognized as one of the leading PR professionals in the Asia Pacific region.

Dr. Sheldon Weinig founded Materials Research Corporation, a multinational semiconductor company listed on the American Stock Exchange that was thereafter acquired by Sony. In 1996, he retired as Vice Chairman of Engineering and Manufacturing of Sony America. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and SUNY at Stony Brook. Dr. Weinig was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1984 and in 1988 was awarded the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur by the French government.

“We are excited about the value that the Advisory Committee can bring to the future development of BarterQuest,” stated Paul Bocheck, President. “We are gratified that people of the caliber of Ray, Harjiv, and Shelly have been willing to lend their experience and insight to our company. Not only should this make BarterQuest a more successful business, but it should help us better serve our users.”

NEW YORK, January 16, 2010 – BarterQuest (http://www.barterquest.com)

Trends

Localization: Every week we are seeing local communities join the internet barter site foray. Sites like ThingHeap.com serve geographically limited areas. Community currency is a new buzz word and financial institutions are backing this kind of currency swap.

Specialization: Switchgames.com services gamers and gamers only, while swaptree.com only does barter with music, books, and video.

Exaggeration: Merchants Barter claims to be the top rated exchange because they got 8 votes on their own survey. MyTradeAmerica asserts they are the biggest, best, and boldest on Twitter, despite being a very new exchange.

Consolidation: IMS buys strong exchanges and incorporates them in to the IMS system. ITEX partners with SuperMedia to create SuperTradeExchange. Barter 21 has an open platform for independents to trade together, as does doBarter, IRTA, NATE and Virtual Barter.

Predictions

This is the hard part. It’s easy to say that the past has been significant and spot trends by looking backward, but looking in to the future requires a crystal ball that I just don’t have. That being said, I am going to make some bold and some not-so-bold predictions for the industry:

1. Barter Will Continue to Become Mainstream – More and more news outlets will cover barter as a business strategy, more gurus will be talking about barter, and barter will continue the conquest of pop culture, american style. Not a bold prediction, but one worth mentioning.
2. More Item Specific Sites Pop Up - Outside the circles of BarterQuest and U-Exchange, local and product centric sites like thingheap.com and switchgames.com become the norm, with other sites appearing for swapping vehicles, home cooked meals, computer equipment, furniture, electronics, and yard work taking center stage. Why? Because it’s easier to faciliate like-for-like barter transactions in a direct trade situation. Think swaptree.com. They do a great job with this.
3. SuperMedia buys ITEX – Pending a successful first year result, SuperMedia announces plans to purchase ITEX in a stock and trade buy-out one year after emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
4. Someone Gets the Independents Together - In order to compete with ITEX and then SuperTradeExchange, most of the independent barter exchanges band together in some kind of group, create a central brand, and do business as a whole new entity.
5. Pirates Still Appear and Disappear – Just like any other year, 2010 has its share of new pirates in the industry (individuals that would rather rape a trade exchange than own a trade exchange). Notably, Tradia, one of the longest running pirate barter organizations, disappears amid lawsuits and franchisee revolts.

That’s it for my list. We’ll check in next year and see how I did. Hopefully I’ll get a couple right and I can claim to be omnicient.

• The opportunity to trade services

• The opportunity to trade real estate

• Clubs to create your own trading community of friends and family or people with similar interests

• Forums to share your thoughts

• Verification to increase your confidence in your trading partners

• Points, our exchange currency, to equalize trading values and acquire items

• Secure payment, a form of escrow that, if you send points in a trade, allows you to confirm that you got what you bargained for before your points become available to your trading partner

• A payment system jointly developed with PayPal to secure any money transfers

Check out their improvements at http://www.barterquest.com

Two and a half weeks later, my computer is still in the box in my office and the furniture is still collecting a bit of dust in storage. Why? What do these barter sites lack? I’ve been in and around the barter industry since 2000. I’ve completed millions of dollars in barter transactions, for myself and for clients of my barter exchange. I’ve worked directly with hundreds of businesses, helping them trade anything from a couple of gift certificates to deeded land. In my mind, I have plenty of expertise to get a simple direct trade transaction completed.

The internet is supposed to help facilitate those transactions. These websites are meant to be a place where other like minded people go to make their trades. My items, though not iPods or iPhones, are high quality and highly desirable items.

So, what went wrong?

The only answer I have come up with in the last couple of days is that direct trade is hard. It’s hard. Finding someone who has something you want, who wants exactly what you have, is a difficult proposition, internet or no internet. Even when BarterQuest sent me a couple of suggestions, it didn’t help much in finding someone who wanted what I have.

Years ago Big Vine was the web site that attempted to facilitate trades online, but on a barter currency. No direct trading, just barter currency trades. With millions of dollars in funding, it lasted a year or two and then was sold, over and over, until now what is left of those clients resides at ITEX.

My experience with these internet barter websites is not much different. What’s missing? What would make a difference?

Brokers. Trade directors. Customer service representatives. Whatever you want to call them, people on the ground making things happen. Though all of these sites are a valiant attempt at helping people barter what they have for what they want, they do not replace the interaction that must take place for people to make trades happen. People can intuitively and casually extract information from potential clients that will help them to make a connection. Computers just ask for information and to fill fields. And the more fields people have to fill out, the less likely they are to actually complete the form. It doesn’t matter why, the experiment was a failure. I traded nothing. In the end, all of the sites I posted my stuff to did not give me what I wanted: a completed barter transaction.

As more startups appear, I will continue with this exploration. Maybe one day a system will be developed to replace what I think brokers do well. Until then, my suggestion is that you are better off working with a traditional barter exchange.

This is an update to part 2. In part 2 I posted items available for trade on four different websites. One week later, I have this to report:

Craigslist generated no responses aside from the ususal spam and people trying to tell me they want to pay me twice what I am asking, if I’ll just send them my bank account information.

Swaptree generated no responses.

U-Exchange generated one response, an old laptop that I just don’t want.

BarterQuest generated two responses, one for a polaroid camera and the other for an HP Pavillion.

Pay me with a Chicken? Nada.

One week in and none of the services are doing a good job of helping me trade my stuff. More to follow.

I’ve been meaning to write this piece for a month and a half, but with the Holidays and the year end, I haven’t had the time I’ve wanted to dedicate to this piece. This morning I spent 4 hours going over the five barter sites of the Part 1, Craigslist, BarterQuest, U-Exchange, Pay Me With a Chicken, and SwapTree.

The original experiment had to be modified for part 2. SwapTree only allows bartering of books, music, movies, and games, so the computer and recliner I am trading just don’t work there. Other than that one modification, the experiment continues.

Remember, the object of the game is to post two things I have, accept all reasonable offers, and consumate a trade. Hopefully one of these sites will provide that. Part 2 is all about posting an item to trade.

Craigslist

I started posting with Craigslist. I am a long time Craigslist user, so navigating through the four pages required to post an item was easy. If you have never used Craigslist, you have to login, click a couple of times, write whatever you want about the item including a description or what you want in return, click to add photos, and then authenticate your post with a Captcha box. That’s it, the listing is live. Slick, easy, not pretty, but loads quickly. No one ever accused Craigslist of being pretty.

Craigslist rating: A- : I can’t get over how ugly it is. I don’t like to look at Craigslist, and you had to move through four screens to post something.

Pay Me With A Chicken

To be very honest, I haven’t logged in to PMWAC since I set up the account back in November. I had forgotten my login credentials on every site, PMWAC not being an exception. I went through the process of trying to recover a password, but none of my secret questions would work. I tried different logins, different passwords, different security questions, and none of them worked. I ended up signing up for a new account instead.

The magic is that PMWAC made signing up a breeze. One page to sign up, no intrusive questions like before, and a simple email confirmation had me on my way to posting. Thanks to PMWAC for reading Part 1.

Unfortunately, posting an item to trade still has a glitch. Let me explain…

Clicking Post an Item to Barter takes you to a screen where you enter basic details of the item, including what you are looking for, and then upload a video and a photo. You aren’t REQUIRED to upload a video, but you can. I decided I would try. I brought up iMovie on my mac, put a picture of both the computer and the chair in to two different movies, and recorded basic voice over. I exported the video twice, once with the built in iMovie exporter to .m4v and the other through Quicktime to .mov, which is supposed to be supported by PMWAC.

Unfortunately, neither video would upload. I finally gave up trying to get the video working and posted my items with just a picture. PMWAC sends you an email confirmation, which is probably unnecessary, to confirm that you want to post what you just posted. You have to click a link to make your post live, which I did, but then my posted items never appeared in my account list. At this point, I honestly gave up. I don’t know if my items are live or not. I don’t think they are.

Pay Me with a Chicken: D : The only reason they didn’t get an F is because signing up is way easier. I couldn’t post a video, like the site says, and then my items didn’t automatically go live, and ultimately I still don’t know if they are live on the site or not.

U-Exchange

U-Exchange is one of the five that I was very skeptical about. I remember the sign up being very difficult and lengthy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the process of posting something to trade was very easy. One page and it is ready. Basic information, very little of it required, so posting is very flexible. Places for four pictures. Very nice.

Additionally, finding what was available in my local area was very easy with regionally based searches.

U-Exchange: A : Easy, fast, non-intrusive. No problems. Immediate gratification. Easier even than Craigslist.

BarterQuest

The first thing that stuck out to me when attempting to log in and post an item to BarterQuest is that they must have a weird password requirement. I couldn’t remember mine, and I use less than a dozen passwords, and none of them worked. Luckily for them, the retrieve password section is very easy and fast, so I did set up a new password, which was inconvenient, but not a deal breaker.

Posting something you want to trade on BarterQuest is a lengthy process, though once you do it a couple of times it becomes more intuitive and fast. First, you select a category, then a subcategory, for what you are posting, then you finally settle on a specific subcategory and fill out the details. Depending on what you are offering, BarterQuest also suggests information. For the computer, it brought up make, model, processor, RAM, etc and made me choose which the computer has, which left me with very little to say about the computer itself. Then after your item is posted, you have to go through another process of adding things that you want in exchange for that item. There is no way to say, “Hey, make me an offer.” You must choose something in exchange. This significantly lengthened the time it took to get my items live. I set up very general categories of what I wanted, and left it at that. After confirming the item, you are taken to a Match page, where the software generates a list of things that may be a match for you based on what you posted that you want and what they asked for. Surprisingly, there were no available items in my local area, Utah. The closest item available is in Arizona. I didn’t spend much time on the list, because of the dearth of locally based items.

Barter Quest: C- : It took waaaaaaaaaaaay too long for me to post something to trade and was a little complicated. That process could be shortened by three pages pretty easily, which would be really nice.

SwapTree

SwapTree won the first round of the battle, and this round, they continued to provide a fantastic service, with only one little hitch. Posting something to SwapTree involved typing a number and clicking twice. That’s it. No providing information, no descriptions, nothing. I think their success in this is limiting what is traded to Books, Music, Movies, and Games. They have a catalog of UPC codes and ISBN #s for books, which is large but incomplete, which controls what you can trade or not. Simply enter the number, and your item pops up. Select the condition and click post and you are finished. Very quick, very easy, and very little time to do it. The downside is that the obscure items I wanted to trade (two of my own band’s CDs from the 1990′s) didn’t appear in their catalog, even though they both have UPC codes. Oh well…when I chose two more mainstream items (Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Night at the Museum DVD) the system worked perfectly.

SwapTree: A+ : Yes, SwapTree couldn’t trade my computer or chair, but for DVD swapping or book trading, the system is magical and quick. No time taken to make something happen. Enter a couple of numbers, click twice, and you are finished. It was my favorite of all the systems.

Part 3 in the upcoming weeks: trying to find someone that wants what I have. I am going to assume that no one is going to contact me from any of my listings and see if I can make a deal happen on my own. Watch for it.

Verification is intended to provide users with greater security when they trade. By verifying potential trading partners, this feature is will increase the confidence of users that they are trading with legitimate counterparties and that they will get what they bargained for. There is a one time verification fee of $1.99, the payment of which will be used in the account verification process.

“Trust can be earned and, over time, the reliable trader on our site will be rewarded with a superior user’s rating,” stated Bianca Han, Executive Vice President of BarterQuest. “Nevertheless, anything that can add to the trading comfort of our users and make it more difficult for the ‘bad guys’ is something that we should provide. We believe that verification will be increasingly demanded in the Internet-based consumer market, and this is another opportunity for BarterQuest to lead the way in e-barter.”